I get the first 1500GB/mo included. I'm looking right now into breaking up my services into multiple servers that each will have 1500GB a month of alotted bandwidth and which will each have 1TB of hdd space. About $250 a month per server which I hope will be cheaper than overage charges so long as I can keep the bandwidth use balanced between the machines.:)
By cutting corners I'd guess. They don't render pages all that well. If you don't follow spec then it's not that hard to go faster.
Not that it's not some good programming involved too.. probably they do have an impressive parser and rendering engine speed-wise. Just pointing out one obvious way they get some of that speed.
If Opera 9 has decent CSS support I might agree. Opera 8's CSS support was pretty crappy. Not compatible with Firefox and Safari or IE which just sort of left it as a thorn in my side that wasn't really worth the effort of fixing. Never have figured out if there is a hack around Opera responds to for selecting an Opera only stylesheet. Anyone know?
The only thing about the PS3 that really interests me is it's parallelism. The CPU has a lot of it going on and it's been rumored that it is designed to make plugging one Cell processing computer into another will let them divide tasks amongst them for more processing power. That sounds to good to be true but the PS3 does come with the proper arrangement of network ports to make it plausible.
Having used a quill mouse I can say that it is one of the least comfortable computing experiences I've ever put myself through. I used to work for the company that made their website so they thought it was a good idea if we used their crappy mouses. Horrible devices all around. I for one don't tend to sit with my hands in a handshake position. Usually when I sit my hands rest palm downwards so that, to me, is the logical way to position my hand when using a computer while sitting.
Okay, let us say developing countries that until recently have been third world or little better. I know a lot of Asian and east Europoean countries are picking up technology quickly and many that didn't have phone service a couple years ago now have faster Net access than we do.
Obviously our telco's and government are sitting on their collective asses letting us get bypassed by the rest of the world.
I've seen the games for the 360 and was just unimpressed. I haven't even thought of buying one. I'll probably buy a PS3 and the Revolution. The PS3 just because I've always been a fan of the quality of the PlayStation and the huge assortment of games available and the Revolution because it sounds really interesting. For me, XBox is a brand trying to replace PlayStation but not really pulling it off. They'd have to either really have some good titles available exclusively to them or Sony would have to really mess up for me to switch. I just don't need two $500 consoles so why would I switch to an unknown that isn't going to be compatible with what I already have? I'm getting the PS3 to play and the Revolution for the same reason I bought a Virtual Boy which is because I am interested in a company actually trying new things. Hopefully Revolution will be a bit more realistic than the VB.;)
Me too. I'm waiting for Google to just put in their own backbones world-wide and set up mesh networking for the last mile connections. They could probably buy up a bunch of the smaller companies without to much effort.
It's a little bit scarey how much power Google could easily have but at the same time they've done a lot more to show that they can be trusted than the companies currently filling those roles. I don't think Google will be a monopoly though. They will only lead the way and new companies following the Google model will follow.
How long will your savings last? Say you have a medical emergency in the family that costs you quite a bit and costs you a sizable portion of your income due to someone not being able to work. Or what if you lost your job and then your spouse had a medical emergency that made them unable to work. I've experienced something close to that and my savings were just not ready to handle that sort of crush. Especially if you're a young person with no family or credit to fall back on you can be really screwed. I'm still trying to dig myself out of that financial hole several years later. Having utiltiies shut off, evicition, and wondering what you're going to do for food really sucks. It's damn hard to find a job if you don't have a working telephone or car and no working shower. I've not been beyond the point of going to a camping park and using their showers but that certainly isn't always an option.
People should have money saved up but not providing any real safety net under people is bad social planning. The basics should be provided for everyone. Food, shelter, and utilities at the minimum. A car, telephone, and computer are almost essentials today too. Education and health care would be smart too but of course then you get into a fight over how much will be given.
I don't like that the US's safety net is so fucked up. We're all paying for it but it's only available to certain people when they need it. Just being a white man isn't a good enough reason to be given help. If you're a woman you're more likely to get help. A single mother is even more likely. Any kind of a minority, druggie, or ex-criminal and you're even more likely. It's not a system that makes sense. For anybody it means jumping through hoops and for some people it's damn near impossible to get the needed help. I've seen people actually go out and put themself into a worse condition, on purpose, just so that they'll qualify. How stupid a system is that.
I think it started with Google starting to buy up their own fiber and tinker with providing a phone service. Google became competition for the telcos and they should be blind scared of that.
The problem with tv is that it is already coming to us without any real packaging so we have little incentive to pay for an official version. The closest you get is the on screen interface and remote and for the most part that is crappy anyway so a pirate network might actually give you better packaging. That is almost to the point of being legitimate competition. Sat and cable companies pay virtually nothing for the programing they resale. A friend that worked in cable told me that they paid about $.50/mo per subscriber for each major block of channels the subscriber had. So all those HBO channels you pay $5-$15/mo for (depending who you get them from) costs them less than a dollar. That'd seem to make them a service company but when's the last time you got good service from a sat or cable company? I have Dish right now and their service sucks and their on screen interface is horrible.
Subscriber services are already harder to pirate than static forms of IP due to their service nature. If they are having massive pirate issues then it's probably their fault. Improve their service, lower prices, or add packaging if they want to keep subscribers.
Most captchas have a blind alternative method. Usually as simple as asking the user to answer a simple question of some sort. "1 + 1 =" or "What letter appears three times in the word cheese?"
Not really much a company can do to protect you from phishers. IMO it isn't their job to do so other than making an effort to let you know what is and isn't official corespondance - which is damn near impossible to do since phishers can copy anything you do.
It's mostly just an issue of educating users and even then even us experienced people are tricked for a second sometimes. Hate to say it but it was obvious when they switched to HTML mail that this would become an issue.
Google is good at spotting such things (so is Thunderbird) but it annoys me that they make it harder to verify if it's a scam or legit by removing the links.
I suggest making your own website. It's not hard to make a few hundred dollars from it a month and as you build a following that money usually goes up. Certainly less shitty than working at Burger King or at least will help pad out that min wage money. If you can write and take some pics you can pretty much blog about something your interested in.;)
That doesn't mean it's free really. That means that both networks charge to connect to them and so when they connect to each other they cancel out the charges. If the tele companies are giving Google free peer status and they don't think it's a benefit to them then it's just stupid of them. Will they lose business if the network down the street has better access to Google than them? Very likely so if it's a noticable difference. Is it enough of a loss if that happens to justify not giving Google a break on the peering? Probably not. Bandwidth should be pretty cheap for the people that own the network - it costs almost as much to have the lines going unused as to have them in use. I'd imagine that most of the traffic between Google and others, through their network, is to somebody that is in some way their customer so they are making money by having Google there.
As you said they are sort of being their own ISP and also they are providing a value to their peer network.
I hate to imagine what their bandwidth expenses are. I can chug through $100 of bandwidth a day sometimes (at $.50/GB) and i just run a few small websites. I'd be shocked if Google isn't moving hundreds of TB's of bandwidth a day at least. Their bandwidth and electrical fees must be unbelivable.
And I certainly am paying for Internet access. For home, office, and mobile access I spend a couple hundred dollars a month. All so I can use ssh and a web browser and expect to get shitty service. When they offer me gigabit DSL to my home and office (not to mention servers) then we'll talk about raising the prices.
With the shitty connections we get here in the US they should be glad we're willing to pay at all. Some third world countries have better net access. Pitiful.
None of that erases the simple facts that A) most developers don't want to be bothered with the business end of things, B) most consumers want to be able to buy a physical product even if it's just a box with a CD inside, and C) opensource isn't going to become the defacto method of software (and any kind of IP) development unless someone fixes things for A and B to get what they want.
I'm a very big fan of opensource stlye licensing and do think it can be profitable but I recognize the fact that for such a system to thrive there needs to be a company that takes care of what authors and customers need and helps to bring those points of interest together. Software might be a service but that doesn't mean the developers want to deal with customers or that customers don't want to buy something they can hold in their hand and show as an asset.
The one that is annoying me mostly lately is phishing attacks trying to get into my eBay account. They send messages that look almost legit and close enough to things I actually do on eBay that if I wasn't a paranoid techie person I might have been tricked. It's almost to the point where a company can't send email to it's customers for risk that spammers and phishers will use that as a means to their ends.
You'd probably want to, at random intervals, ask for the user to fill in a captcha or something similar to that. Maybe more often for higher paying messages.
It'd be nice to flip the spam problem on it's ear though where it was the spammer that had to be careful of who they were spamming. Let them be careful and send out messages to smaller more targeted groups.
Google, with GMail's collection of information about the owners of the accounts would be good at targeting those messages.
Yeah, but that is actually a pain and last time I checked (more involved than just opening the message and looking at it) and didn't pay you $1 per message. My mother does that and gets crappy little gift cards worth a fraction of the money she could earn in a job working the same number of hours. She could earn more spending that time writing random things down in a blog and collecting ad money from the site.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the first 1500GB/mo included. I'm looking right now into breaking up my services into multiple servers that each will have 1500GB a month of alotted bandwidth and which will each have 1TB of hdd space. About $250 a month per server which I hope will be cheaper than overage charges so long as I can keep the bandwidth use balanced between the machines. :)
By cutting corners I'd guess. They don't render pages all that well. If you don't follow spec then it's not that hard to go faster.
Not that it's not some good programming involved too.. probably they do have an impressive parser and rendering engine speed-wise. Just pointing out one obvious way they get some of that speed.
If Opera 9 has decent CSS support I might agree. Opera 8's CSS support was pretty crappy. Not compatible with Firefox and Safari or IE which just sort of left it as a thorn in my side that wasn't really worth the effort of fixing. Never have figured out if there is a hack around Opera responds to for selecting an Opera only stylesheet. Anyone know?
The only thing about the PS3 that really interests me is it's parallelism. The CPU has a lot of it going on and it's been rumored that it is designed to make plugging one Cell processing computer into another will let them divide tasks amongst them for more processing power. That sounds to good to be true but the PS3 does come with the proper arrangement of network ports to make it plausible.
The first time I Googled for it I got nothing. The second time, three seconds later, I tried I got a few results.
Having used a quill mouse I can say that it is one of the least comfortable computing experiences I've ever put myself through. I used to work for the company that made their website so they thought it was a good idea if we used their crappy mouses. Horrible devices all around. I for one don't tend to sit with my hands in a handshake position. Usually when I sit my hands rest palm downwards so that, to me, is the logical way to position my hand when using a computer while sitting.
Okay, let us say developing countries that until recently have been third world or little better. I know a lot of Asian and east Europoean countries are picking up technology quickly and many that didn't have phone service a couple years ago now have faster Net access than we do.
Obviously our telco's and government are sitting on their collective asses letting us get bypassed by the rest of the world.
I've seen the games for the 360 and was just unimpressed. I haven't even thought of buying one. I'll probably buy a PS3 and the Revolution. The PS3 just because I've always been a fan of the quality of the PlayStation and the huge assortment of games available and the Revolution because it sounds really interesting. For me, XBox is a brand trying to replace PlayStation but not really pulling it off. They'd have to either really have some good titles available exclusively to them or Sony would have to really mess up for me to switch. I just don't need two $500 consoles so why would I switch to an unknown that isn't going to be compatible with what I already have? I'm getting the PS3 to play and the Revolution for the same reason I bought a Virtual Boy which is because I am interested in a company actually trying new things. Hopefully Revolution will be a bit more realistic than the VB. ;)
Me too. I'm waiting for Google to just put in their own backbones world-wide and set up mesh networking for the last mile connections. They could probably buy up a bunch of the smaller companies without to much effort.
It's a little bit scarey how much power Google could easily have but at the same time they've done a lot more to show that they can be trusted than the companies currently filling those roles. I don't think Google will be a monopoly though. They will only lead the way and new companies following the Google model will follow.
How long will your savings last? Say you have a medical emergency in the family that costs you quite a bit and costs you a sizable portion of your income due to someone not being able to work. Or what if you lost your job and then your spouse had a medical emergency that made them unable to work. I've experienced something close to that and my savings were just not ready to handle that sort of crush. Especially if you're a young person with no family or credit to fall back on you can be really screwed. I'm still trying to dig myself out of that financial hole several years later. Having utiltiies shut off, evicition, and wondering what you're going to do for food really sucks. It's damn hard to find a job if you don't have a working telephone or car and no working shower. I've not been beyond the point of going to a camping park and using their showers but that certainly isn't always an option.
People should have money saved up but not providing any real safety net under people is bad social planning. The basics should be provided for everyone. Food, shelter, and utilities at the minimum. A car, telephone, and computer are almost essentials today too. Education and health care would be smart too but of course then you get into a fight over how much will be given.
I don't like that the US's safety net is so fucked up. We're all paying for it but it's only available to certain people when they need it. Just being a white man isn't a good enough reason to be given help. If you're a woman you're more likely to get help. A single mother is even more likely. Any kind of a minority, druggie, or ex-criminal and you're even more likely. It's not a system that makes sense. For anybody it means jumping through hoops and for some people it's damn near impossible to get the needed help. I've seen people actually go out and put themself into a worse condition, on purpose, just so that they'll qualify. How stupid a system is that.
I think it started with Google starting to buy up their own fiber and tinker with providing a phone service. Google became competition for the telcos and they should be blind scared of that.
The problem with tv is that it is already coming to us without any real packaging so we have little incentive to pay for an official version. The closest you get is the on screen interface and remote and for the most part that is crappy anyway so a pirate network might actually give you better packaging. That is almost to the point of being legitimate competition. Sat and cable companies pay virtually nothing for the programing they resale. A friend that worked in cable told me that they paid about $.50/mo per subscriber for each major block of channels the subscriber had. So all those HBO channels you pay $5-$15/mo for (depending who you get them from) costs them less than a dollar. That'd seem to make them a service company but when's the last time you got good service from a sat or cable company? I have Dish right now and their service sucks and their on screen interface is horrible.
Subscriber services are already harder to pirate than static forms of IP due to their service nature. If they are having massive pirate issues then it's probably their fault. Improve their service, lower prices, or add packaging if they want to keep subscribers.
Most captchas have a blind alternative method. Usually as simple as asking the user to answer a simple question of some sort. "1 + 1 =" or "What letter appears three times in the word cheese?"
Not really much a company can do to protect you from phishers. IMO it isn't their job to do so other than making an effort to let you know what is and isn't official corespondance - which is damn near impossible to do since phishers can copy anything you do.
It's mostly just an issue of educating users and even then even us experienced people are tricked for a second sometimes. Hate to say it but it was obvious when they switched to HTML mail that this would become an issue.
Google is good at spotting such things (so is Thunderbird) but it annoys me that they make it harder to verify if it's a scam or legit by removing the links.
I suggest making your own website. It's not hard to make a few hundred dollars from it a month and as you build a following that money usually goes up. Certainly less shitty than working at Burger King or at least will help pad out that min wage money. If you can write and take some pics you can pretty much blog about something your interested in. ;)
That doesn't mean it's free really. That means that both networks charge to connect to them and so when they connect to each other they cancel out the charges. If the tele companies are giving Google free peer status and they don't think it's a benefit to them then it's just stupid of them. Will they lose business if the network down the street has better access to Google than them? Very likely so if it's a noticable difference. Is it enough of a loss if that happens to justify not giving Google a break on the peering? Probably not. Bandwidth should be pretty cheap for the people that own the network - it costs almost as much to have the lines going unused as to have them in use. I'd imagine that most of the traffic between Google and others, through their network, is to somebody that is in some way their customer so they are making money by having Google there.
As you said they are sort of being their own ISP and also they are providing a value to their peer network.
I hate to imagine what their bandwidth expenses are. I can chug through $100 of bandwidth a day sometimes (at $.50/GB) and i just run a few small websites. I'd be shocked if Google isn't moving hundreds of TB's of bandwidth a day at least. Their bandwidth and electrical fees must be unbelivable.
And I certainly am paying for Internet access. For home, office, and mobile access I spend a couple hundred dollars a month. All so I can use ssh and a web browser and expect to get shitty service. When they offer me gigabit DSL to my home and office (not to mention servers) then we'll talk about raising the prices.
With the shitty connections we get here in the US they should be glad we're willing to pay at all. Some third world countries have better net access. Pitiful.
None of that erases the simple facts that A) most developers don't want to be bothered with the business end of things, B) most consumers want to be able to buy a physical product even if it's just a box with a CD inside, and C) opensource isn't going to become the defacto method of software (and any kind of IP) development unless someone fixes things for A and B to get what they want.
I'm a very big fan of opensource stlye licensing and do think it can be profitable but I recognize the fact that for such a system to thrive there needs to be a company that takes care of what authors and customers need and helps to bring those points of interest together. Software might be a service but that doesn't mean the developers want to deal with customers or that customers don't want to buy something they can hold in their hand and show as an asset.
The mail client should provide the captchas - since you're supposed to need a special certified client anyway.
The one that is annoying me mostly lately is phishing attacks trying to get into my eBay account. They send messages that look almost legit and close enough to things I actually do on eBay that if I wasn't a paranoid techie person I might have been tricked. It's almost to the point where a company can't send email to it's customers for risk that spammers and phishers will use that as a means to their ends.
I think the costs can go up dramaticly as the number of employees goes up. Certain things go from optional to required.
You'd probably want to, at random intervals, ask for the user to fill in a captcha or something similar to that. Maybe more often for higher paying messages.
It'd be nice to flip the spam problem on it's ear though where it was the spammer that had to be careful of who they were spamming. Let them be careful and send out messages to smaller more targeted groups.
Google, with GMail's collection of information about the owners of the accounts would be good at targeting those messages.
If it's as cheap or cheaper than sending snail mail and would get past spam filters I think companies would do it.
Yeah, but that is actually a pain and last time I checked (more involved than just opening the message and looking at it) and didn't pay you $1 per message. My mother does that and gets crappy little gift cards worth a fraction of the money she could earn in a job working the same number of hours. She could earn more spending that time writing random things down in a blog and collecting ad money from the site.
So all these people who are unemployed and simply can't find jobs are desirable?